Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842 to 1949

1999 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 306-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam McKeown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Transnational Families ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Primary Research ◽  
Chinese Nationalism ◽  
Chinese Migration

Each of these epigrams is from an exemplary work of primary research. While not entirely exclusive—potential for overlap appears in the ideas of “mutual development” and “transfer” of culture—they each exemplify different research agendas that result in competing narratives of Chinese migration. Sucheng Chan's work is part of a larger project of contemporary Asian American studies to incorporate Chinese as important actors in American history. It emphasizes the adaptations of Chinese social organization in the United States, and explains them as necessary and unprecedented responses to unfamiliar challenges. Although Chan pays more attention than many Asian American historians to Chinese nationalism, transnational families, and continued links to China, she does not follow the implications of these descriptions so far as to reformulate her narrative of migration as a monodirectional relocation followed by locally conditioned transformation (see also S. Chan 1991, 63–66,96–97; 1990). In their most extremely America-centered versions, Asian American histories have treated these extra-American phenomena as little more than byproducts of exclusion and racism, and denounced the idea of the temporary Chinese sojourner as an orientalist construction (A. Chan 1981).

Teaching Asian American Studies in Japan

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masumi Izumi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
University Students ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
American University ◽  
Cultural Movements

This chapter juxtaposes Asian American scholarship in Japan and the United States, and explores ways in which the field can be pedagogically useful for deconstructing hegemonic social discourses on race, culture, ethnicity and justice both for Japanese and American university students and scholars. Teaching the history of Japanese emigration to the Pan-Pacific region not only helps Japanese students to overcome the historical amnesia about their country’s imperial past, but also helps American students to contextualize the migration from Japan to the US within the overall Japanese emigration history. Structural analyses of race lead to students’ better understanding of different ways in which race has historically created, naturalized and perpetuated social and economic hierarchy within the United States and Japan. Furthermore, learning about the social protest and cultural movements that led to the birth of Asian American studies can promote positive views among university students toward political engagement and social activism.

Asian American Folklore and Folklife

2018 ◽  
pp. 740-755
Author(s):  
Fariha Khan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Model Minority ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Food Cultures ◽  
American Folklore ◽  
Diverse Groups

The study of Asian-American folklore and folklife focuses on the diverse peoples of Asia as they navigate their lives in America. Sharing the historical framework of Asian American Studies, Asian American folklore and folklife studies are informed by, and respond to, a legacy in the United States of racial discrimination, and stereotypes of the Asian “model minority” and “forever foreigner.” More specifically, these studies challenge Eurocentric ethnic folklore theory and method by emphasizing the distinctive ways in which diverse groups within the Asian American rubric create and sustain folkloric identities and raising the question of whether there is an emerging pan-Asian American or transnational identity evident in music and other folk forms. This chapter presents as examples approaches to, and interpretations of, in folkloristic studies of religious observance, artistic expressions, and food cultures in everyday practice of various groups in the United States with backgrounds in China, Japan, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Korea. Folklore and folklife scholarship on Asian America should foster a multidimensional perspective approach that counters the image of Asian homogeneity.

Afterword: Transnational Asian Studies—Toward More Inclusive Theory and Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 1033-1044
Author(s):  
Sonia Ryang
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
White Male ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
The One

Based on the articles in this “Global Asias” forum, this essay proposes that in order to build a meaningful bridge between Asian studies and Asian American studies, we must first face what needs to be critically overcome in Asian studies itself: persistent white male domination of the field, on the one hand, and historical role that the United States has played in Asia, on the other. One possibility is to adopt a transnational Asian studies approach, which advocates bringing Asian studies and Asian American studies together while also envisioning radical interdisciplinarity across Asian studies and African American studies, Latino/a studies, and Asian American studies. The key to pursuing such an approach would be to create a teaching and research environment of inclusion and collaboration.

Japanese Americans in Academia and Political Discourse in Japan

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Okiyoshi Takeda
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
The U.S

I am a political scientist specializing in Asian American politics. Although I earned my PhD in the United States, my initial interest was in the U.S. Congress and not in Japanese American studies or Asian American studies. What shifted my interest toward Asian American studies was that I had witnessed firsthand a campus sit-in at the Princeton University president’s office, where students were fighting for the establishment of an Asian American studies program. Witnessing such an incident, I realized that Asian Americans were an understudied topic in the field of political science. There is also a tendency for scholars from Japan to focus exclusively on Japanese Americans and to disregard other Asian American ethnic groups. Since I did not start out my study on Asian Americans in a graduate school in Japan with an interest in Japanese Americans, I have been able to avoid taking that kind of path....

Asian Americans and Education

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Chang
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Family Involvement ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
American Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Cultural Economic

The communities that constitute the racialized category of Asian Americans consist of approximately 20 million people in the United States, or about 5% of the total population. About 20% or 4 million are of primary or secondary school age, and over 1.1 million are in higher education. Both in popular and academic discourse, “Asian American” generally refers to people who have ethnic backgrounds in South Asia (e.g., Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka), Southeast Asia (e.g., Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam), and East Asia (e.g., China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan). As “Asian American” is an umbrella term used to categorize a very diverse, heterogeneous, and transnational set of populations, Asian Americans as a group present various challenges to education and research in and about the United States. These challenges can concern paradigms of achievement, citizenship, family involvement, access (e.g., higher education, bilingual education), language and culture, race and ethnicity, and school community. In order to address these paradigmatic challenges, a great deal of scholarship has called for a disaggregation of the data on populations that fall under the pan-ethnic “Asian America” umbrella term, to gain a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of the many diverse populations and their historical, cultural, economic, and political experiences. To further address the problematic framing of Asian Americans in education and related fields, scholars have applied critical lenses to key tensions within conceptualization, policy, curriculum, and pedagogy. More recently, the notions of intersectionality and transnationalism have been generative in the study of Asian Americans, within not only educational research but also Asian American studies, which generally falls under the field of ethnic studies in the U.S. context, but has also been categorized under American studies, cultural studies, or Asian studies. While characterizations of Asian Americans as “the Model Minority” or “the Oppressed Minority” persist, the relevance of such static binaries has increasingly been challenged as the Asian American populations and migrations continue to diversify and increase.

Hemispheric Approaches to Asian American Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald C. Goellnicht
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Asian American ◽  
North American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Asian North American

Hemispheric approaches to Asian American literature disrupt, supplement, and interrogate the cultural nationalist focus of early Asian American studies, transpacific and transnational approaches to Asian American studies that came to prominence in the 1990s, and the overall dominance of the United States in Asian American studies. These approaches have largely been championed by scholars working in Canada or on Canadian material, by feminist and queer scholars, and by those working on interethnic or interracial approaches between “Asian American” and black/African American, Latinx, and/or Native/Indigenous communities. The term “hemispheric” was preceded by Asian North American, which has been employed from fairly early in the maturing of Asian American literary and cultural criticism. Key also is the scholarly history of hemispheric approaches to Asian North American literature and culture (and to a lesser extent Asian Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture), the cross-border relations between artists and activists of Asian descent in North America, and the U.S. cultural imperialism inherent in this approach as well as its potential to diversify and open up the field of Asian American literary and cultural studies. The hemispheric approach also uncovers some of the limitations of the “transnational” and “diaspora” approaches that currently dominate Asian American studies and emphasize an east-west, transpacific spatiality.

Asian American Literary Reception and Readership

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Bhalla
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
Literary Reception

Asian American literary studies, and multi-ethnic literatures more broadly, have maintained a constant faith in the power of literature as a potential tool of anti-racist education. This faith in literature’s potential is not naïve, since it also recognizes how even the most diverse and ideal literary education can be co-opted by the workings of capitalism and neoliberalism. These fields are founded in an enduring and powerful belief that literature affects the social, cultural, and political esteem of a minority group in the United States. Within the field of Asian American studies, academics, activists, and cultural critics have sought to harness the power of various forms of cultural discourse and literature by mediating the stories told about (and at times by) Asian Americans. As Asian American literature has grown in popularity, there has been increasing attention to questions of who is represented within Asian American literature and who is deemed worthy to produce these representations. Such concerns have over time produced an abiding if somewhat tacit interest in questions of literary reception in the field. In fact, although many of the major literary controversies in Asian American studies have circulated around questions of representation and reception and ushered in paradigm shifts in how the field has conceptualized itself, it is an area that remains understudied. Asian American literary reception study and studies of readership are still emerging and crucial areas of analysis that could pose and posit answers to questions of literature’s possibilities and limitations as a tool of anti-racism in 21st-century America.

Minoritized Criticism of the New Testament

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tat-siong Benny Liew
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Biblical Texts

Minoritized criticism of the New Testament refers generally to academic and critical interpretations of biblical texts by people of color in the United States of America, where they are often called “minorities.” The word “minoritized” signifies that the issue in question is less about number but more about power, as minoritization is a state-sanctioned and ideologically supported process—including using the Bible for justification—of racialization and marginalization against particular persons or communities because of their race/ethnicity and their migration history. With the civil rights movement and James Cone’s development of black liberation theology in the late 1960s, African American biblical scholars began to protest white supremacy by highlighting racial/ethnic relations and tensions in biblical writings and by making their biblical interpretation explicitly contextual to their communities’ histories, experiences, and concerns. Since then, with the model provided by their black colleagues and the emphasis on “social location” within biblical studies, Asian American and Latinx American scholars have also developed their respective hermeneutics to challenge racial discrimination and address issues of identity, representation, inclusion, exclusion, exploitation, oppression, and resistance, among others, both in the biblical texts that they read and in the contemporary situations that their communities face. Given this criticism’s concern with minoritized communities, practitioners often engage African American studies, Asian American studies, or Latinx American studies to inform their work. Because of minoritization’s connection with migration and its dynamics as a form of internal colonialism, there are also often overlaps between minoritized criticism and postcolonial criticism of the New Testament. While minoritized criticism started with a focus on race/ethnicity, subsequent works, upon acknowledgment that there are other identity factors besides race (such as gender, class, sexuality) and recognition that race and other identity factors are often mutually co-constitutive, have been giving greater emphasis on diversities and keener attention to intersectional realities within each minoritized community. Recently, there is a move to understand minoritized criticism as work that engages across racially/ethically minoritized communities (as opposed to scholarship that works exclusively within a critic’s own minoritized community). This understanding emphasizes the reality that minoritized groups are racialized not in isolation but in relation to one another, and the need to decenter whiteness by prioritizing critics of other minoritized communities as one’s interlocutors. Since minoritization as a result of migration may take place in various countries, minoritized criticism of the New Testament can also be practiced and developed outside of the United States.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Yuan Shu
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
Atlantic Coast ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Transnational American Studies ◽  
The Pacific

Against the background of colonialism and the emergence of de-colonial thinking, we first explore the trajectoryof the Euro-American consciousness and movement from the Atlantic coast tothe Pacific coast of the United States and from North America to the Asia Pacific,and suggest the specific ways in which Asian studies, Asian American studies, and Pacificstudies intervene in American exceptionalism as alternatives. Next, we considerthe formation and development of the Asia Pacific in terms of what Kuan-HsingChen calls “Asia as method,” and the construction of the Pacific Islands in relation towhat Epeli Hau‘ofa defines as “our sea of islands” and “the ocean in us.” While Cheninsists on decolonization as a mutual process for the colonized and the colonizeralike, Hau‘ofa envisions a new indigenous way of rereading geography and rewriting humanity against neocolonialist and neo-imperialist practice. By investigatingthe transpacific as moments of military, cultural, and geopolitical contentions aswell as sites of global economic integration and resistance, we develop transpacificAmerican studies as a new critical paradigm in transnational American studies.

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